IRS Leaks 120,000 Taxpayers’ Info, Blames
‘Human Coding Error’
Daily Caller,
by
John Hugh DeMastri
Original Article
Posted By: Imright,
9/2/2022 9:17:45 PM
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) posted the confidential information of approximately 120,000 taxpayers before an error on its website was taken down Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing officials within the IRS.
In a Friday letter to Congress, the IRS and Treasury Department blamed a human coding error from 2021, the first year that the Form 990-T was able to be filed electronically, the WSJ reported. The error resulted in nonpublic data being made available for download to users of the IRS website, and was not discovered until “recent weeks,” according to the WSJ.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
Strike3 9/2/2022 9:27:33 PM (No. 1266877)
Schiff happens in the wonderful world of computers, especially when you don't test your changes thoroughly. I was superb in my programming days but rushing in a change has burned me more than once.
7 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
coyote 9/2/2022 9:28:49 PM (No. 1266878)
And who is going to be fired for this release? The coder? Maybe it should be some officers instead.
11 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
MickTurn 9/2/2022 9:40:29 PM (No. 1266898)
Sounds like Lois Learner is still in charge of purposeful incompetence.
15 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
itsonlyme 9/2/2022 9:41:23 PM (No. 1266899)
The Knotseez what 87,000 more people working for the IRS. Who do you think they're gonna go after?
4 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
snapper451 9/2/2022 9:46:50 PM (No. 1266909)
Anyone else out there notice that this story is in a UK paper, not a US paper? MSM burying it but the Brits have to tell us. My guess is 99.9% of those revealed gave to or somehow supported Trump.
14 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
snakeoil 9/2/2022 9:50:18 PM (No. 1266912)
Am glad I have no idea what form 990-T is.
8 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
EJKrausJr 9/2/2022 10:36:54 PM (No. 1266975)
Human coding error, my hind end. And 87K more of these morons are being hired. Disband the IRS. Value added tax for everything purchased. Ten percent is good enough for the Government. No income tax, period.
12 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
DVC 9/3/2022 12:35:33 AM (No. 1267012)
Affirmative action programmer?
5 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
ronniethek 9/3/2022 1:10:26 AM (No. 1267025)
Does anyone serially believe the total BULLSCHIFF coming from the IRS. No accident here. We just don't yet know who were the intended victims. But we will!!
2 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
Petronius 9/3/2022 6:05:18 AM (No. 1267083)
If it were a private citizen or a corporation that made a mistake of this magnitude, there would be a long invstigation, huge fines and possible prison time. Whenever a federal alphabet agency makes a mistake, it's just a whoopsie, my bad and nothing. Not even steps taken to make sure it does not happen again.
3 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
laurenc 9/3/2022 6:06:38 AM (No. 1267085)
Form 990-T is probably secret code for MAGA Republicans.
2 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
janjan 9/3/2022 8:21:47 AM (No. 1267162)
#1 I also spent my career in IT. They are struggling to maintain 60 year old code on systems so old there are no operating system updates or any other maintenance. Easy to blame ‘the code’ but there is another component called ‘data’.
2 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
hershey 9/3/2022 8:51:44 AM (No. 1267193)
Nah, having been a programmer for years, computers don't have coding errors..they have human errors. they do exactly what they are told..no AI yet......computers are only 1's and 0's and yes/no ...
If fieldA = 'republican'
then goto releasedata
if fieldA = 'democrat'
then goto giverefund
2 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
Right Time 9/3/2022 9:05:38 AM (No. 1267205)
I will bet that all those people whose information was leaked were Republicans
0 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
bad-hair 9/3/2022 9:33:26 AM (No. 1267233)
A human coding error by 87,000 ex coal miners ? sarcoff
1 person likes this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
DVC 9/3/2022 12:49:47 PM (No. 1267447)
Re #12, and where do you find COBOLers in 2022? As the very last of the baby boomers retire, any day now, will COBOL wind up being like Egyptian hieroglyphics, strange symbols that only a few rare experts trained in archeology can interpret?
And are there still IBM mainframes out their burning through mega watts of electricity and spinning DASDs by the acre? Or has the hardware been replaced with modern stuff but still running the old IBM mainframe OS? OS emulators?
I shifted my engineering simulation and analysis work off of IBM mainframes in the middle 80s, to VAXes, then to several upstart supercomputer companies who haven't survived, and finally to large parallel Crays at the end of my career.
The COBOL programmers were in a different group, but all were as old or older than I, and even in the 90s the topic of conversation often turned to "How in hell will they keep this ancient code running for another 10 years?" and that was 30 years ago now. AFAIK, most of the large government computer systems of the past were either written in FORTRAN (scientific/engineering) or COBOL (business/admin/accounting). And while I taught FORTRAN to HS students, mostly because it is very simple to learn, in the 90s, I think that most programming has moved to C or C++ years ago.
When will someone entirely rewrite all the software that underpins the government - IRS, Social Security, Military Records, FAA ? The few attempts I know of (FAA) have been hugely expensive failures, billions spent on unusable junk.
0 people like this.
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